I am not gonna buy one.....

10 years ago, my father and I did the tech stuff together at church. Projector, TV display, music, lights, you name it. Whatever the minister and congregation needed, we cobbled it together out of whatever donated stuff we had on hand usually at the last minute.

My father was always the quiet genius, never complained about time crunches or last minute requests, he just did what was needed as best he could. I was more like mom, especially coming into high school, hot about everything, never satisfied with anything. Looking back, I'm sure I asked for a ton of patience. But that's what my dad was teaching me each Sunday, I guess. Together we pulled off some literal miracles of old tech.

So one weekend, after months of talking to my friend about which one to get, I put together all the money I saved over the school year and summer to get a pretty decent gaming laptop. You have to understand that my father is an old school type where wont purchase any new electronics but would rather repurpose old parts. I wasn't having any of that because the computer that I purchased was 10 times faster than the fastest computer that he had at home. And his best computer was 10 times faster than the one that we had at the chapel.

After proving that my new laptop was better than his I began to request that we update all of the older things in the chapel as well. So on Sundays I would request that we would get new lights, new audio equipment, new microphones, new this and new that. He would say it's not necessary but allow me to get what I could anyway.

I spent a lot of money upgrading stuff at church and throwing out older items. In retrospect the equipment that we had been using worked perfectly fine and the newer equipment, while more expensive, was not actually better for our needs.

One day the minister came up to me and said that we had to set up the AV equipment for a brief tutorial on offering collection that was going to be played via video. Simple enough to set up. I went about gathering the TV and then asked the minister for his laptop so I could hook it up to the TV and play the video off of his laptop.

He smiled then from his jacket pocket pulled out a DVD. He told me that his laptop had no CD tray and therefore no way to play DVDs. I said no problem and went to find my personal gaming laptop. With DVD in hand I went and found my dad sitting at a table with our stuff. Upon inspecting my laptop I realized that I too had no way of playing DVDs. I had also recently thrown away the only DVD player that I knew about in the chapel. It had been years since I played a DVD, maybe 5 or more. Nobody uses DVDs nowadays! We had Netflix and the internet to get all that.

I heard familiar laughter then. My father, looking at me clutching this DVD like some alien relic, realized right away what the problem was. He led me to a closet at the back of the chapel where he had stored most of the stuff that I thought I had thrown in the trash. Among them was the DVD player but he still pulled out his ancient desktop tower computer which had an equally ancient DVD player and a new HDMI video card that would allow me to hook it up to the television that we needed to use.

So to this day I have had no heart to tell my father to upgrade or throw away any of his old equipment because the Lord knows I might come asking for it and would have to eat that humble pie all over again.

Bless your dad for keeping the dvd player and other stuff. It feels like your dad knows that newer technologies have these unecessary downgrade. And he knows that old technologies still works and last longer (even today). Please follow his beliefs in the future.

Kind of surprised to see no one has suggested this. You can take the CD-Keys from the manuals and inside the boxes and most of them can be added to Steam. If it doesn't work on Steam then it most likely will work on Epic. I have a bunch of old CD/DVD based games and I was able to add most of them to my Steam Library using the CD-Keys. Turns them into Digital Copies.

I bought a copy of Euro Truck Simulator 2 from a friend that had only had polish and spanish as language options but I only speak german and english. Added it to Steam with the CD key and now I have all language options. Great feature.
Didn't work with any of the 50 or so games I had
Interesting, I have never heard of that feature. But well, most of my old games aren't on Steam anyway and those that are, I have bought years ago for cheap.

You can find an external DVD RW drive for under $20 online. Then you can rip your disks into ISO images and play them any time.

At what point do you not just pirate the game that you already own?
- Actually you can legally download torrents of games that you already own.
- Steam used to allow you to convert certain physical games to digital if you put the CD key into Steam's "Add a Non-Steam Game" menu.
  
  It wasn't all games but quite a few, so if you're sitting on a big physical library this is a legitimate option.

A neighbor tossed out all that old games like doom 3, black and white, command and conquer etc. I was so hyped when I found em. Then I remember I have em all on steam anyways

Did he have the boxes in good condition? I miss old PC boxes.
- God I loved having a bookshelf full of game cases. A digital library just isn't the same.
I think you might be my neighbor.

I ran into too many compatibility problems trying to run old games to make the effort of keeping them around and trying to find some way to load the media worth it. Also, floppy disks don’t age well.

I usually end up purchasing the game again on gog. They’re pretty inexpensive and I have a better chance of getting something that will be compatible with my current setup. I haven’t tried running any gog games on my steam deck yet, though.

You can get USB DVD players pretty cheap now. Sometimes its handy to have one

Lol that's what the sales guy said about my USB floppy drive. It's been sitting in the closet, untouched for years, next to the sata DVD burner I also keep around "just in case"

This is why I've always kept my old lightscribe DVD burner. Heck, I even have a USB floppy drive around here somewhere.

I picked up a USB DVD burner for like $12 years ago. Haven't used it much but when I needed it, I really needed it
I build my own pc's for 24 or so years now. You wouldn't believe how long i installed a floppy drive into my gaming pc's, just because that's how i always done it.
- I still have a floppy drive, though it's not connected anymore. I built my main PC 20 years ago and I've upgraded the core components of it four times now and just left the drive in each time, but the current mb doesn't have the connection. I did actually use it about 5-6 years ago to pull off data from a bunch of disks for an elderly person, but I think that was the only time.
- I just barely threw away some old SVCD movies that I torrented back when torrent was brand new. I had an entire folder of them and have hung onto them all these years despite never rewatching them. I had the version of the first Hulk movie where he's not wearing pants in one of the shots because it was a leak from before it was actually finished. But I finally got to a point where I was certain I'd never actually put those CDs in a player again.

Wait what? Have we already ditched cds?

I always make sure my PC has an internal Blu-ray drive (ATX case). They're one of the cheaper PC components.
- I used to as well. But after building and going through 3 different generations of PCs and realizing I never use it I don’t bother anymore. I don’t own CDs anymore and never will again.
  
  Pretty soon it will be rare to find an optical drive for sale and for good reason. They are like cassette drives and VCRs now.
Yeah, over a decade ago, my friend. The last time I owned a optical drive if any sort (Including in the car) was 2008. I don't even miss disc media. Hard drives are cheap and internet is fast now.
- Damn, I and to think I remember having a DVD player in maybe 2010.